The purchase of a home is typically the largest investment that a person makes. Because of the amount of money required to purchase a home, most home buyers do not have sufficient assets to purchase a home outright on a cash basis. In addition, buyers who have already purchased a home may wish to refinance their home. Therefore, potential home buyers consult lenders such as banks, credit unions, mortgage companies, savings and loan institutions, state and local housing finance agencies, and so on, to obtain the funds necessary to purchase or refinance their homes. These lenders offer mortgage products to potential home buyers or borrowers. Borrowers may also obtain information regarding available mortgage products from other types of advisors such as mortgage brokers and realtors.
Typically, when a borrower works with an advisor to obtain a loan, the advisor first obtains various financial and other information from the borrower. Using this information, the advisor selects a particular loan product for the borrower which the advisor perceives as likely being available to the borrower. The advisor may then use an on-line automated underwriting engine to obtain an underwriting recommendation for the particular mortgage product for the borrower.
In addition to underwriting, the borrower may be required to submit a number of other documents such as pay stubs to verify income, declarations that certain court judgments do not refer to them or encumber their property, and so on. In many instances, the information is not required initially, but is required upon further processing of the application. Managing the flow of information and the associated documents that include the information is often a formidable task, especially in situations where a large number of applications are being processed simultaneously.
Oftentimes, one or more individuals is charged with managing a large number of loan applications. Due to the high volume of applications, it is easy for the person responsible for a loan application to forget to inform the borrower that certain information is required or to not act as quickly on providing the information as would be desirable. These potential delays and the costs associated with managing the loan application in this manner serve to increase the overall cost of borrowing money to pay for the home—even to the point of preventing some borrowers from being able to achieve the dream of homeownership. At the very least, the cost associated with obtaining a loan may discourage present homeowners from taking advantage of lower interest rates by refinancing their current loan.
Reducing these costs would translate into greater savings to the home owner, more efficient allocation of resources through refinancing, and, ultimately, result in more families achieving the dream of homeownership. More families would achieve the dream of homeownership if a system was provided that made the process of originating a loan less labor intensive, more streamlined, and, ideally, less costly.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a system and method that make the loan origination process less labor intensive, more efficient and streamlined, and, ideally, less costly. It would be desirable to provide a system and method or the like of a type disclosed in the present application that includes any one or more of these or other advantageous features. It should be appreciated, however, that the teachings herein may also be applied to achieve systems and methods that do not necessarily achieve any of the foregoing advantages but rather achieve different advantages.